Tuesday, February 25, 2014Teachers’ Union president says State of the State missed key pointsPresident Melissa Cropper wanted Gov. John Kasich to touch on the Common CoreStory by AMY HANSEN

In The Region:

A major portion of Gov. John Kasich's State of the State speech focused on education. But the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers told StateImpact Ohio's Amy Hansen the governor still may have missed some pretty big points.

Melissa Cropper says Gov. John Kasich outlined some nice ideas about how to keep kids from dropping out of school and helping people gain access to college. But all told, she’s not satisfied with the governor’s priorities for education.

“What concerns me the most is what was not said. And that’s not addressing existing problems that are in the system, and what we’re going to do about those. There’s some great ideas for community connectors, dealing with dropouts, making career connections, those all have potential, but let’s look at those existing problems we already have in our system and how we are going to deal with those.”

And Cropper says some of those problems include the implementation of a new set of learning expectations known as the Common Core.

Kasich also didn’t talk about the Ohio Teachers Evaluation System or anything related to the state’s charter schools.

All of those issues have sparked controversy in recent years.Without any mention of progress in those areas, Cropper’s left wanting a little more.

“I need to hear a little about what kind of changes we are going to make in this current system that we have that are going to allow these innovative ideas to take place. Because we can’t keep dumping more and more on.”

As for the time frame regarding these new education initiatives, Kasich mentioned he’ll roll out the details within the next few weeks.